An alien landing in the scholarly and scientific publishing world today, reading all the opinions about how to make things more efficient and effective, might be forgiven for thinking there are only authors, readers, librarians, and reviewers. After all, those […]
Organizations seeking change will often turn to an individual to bring about that change. The challenge for such a change agent is how to move the organization forward without breaking it.
Hysteria over a supervolcano leads to speculation about the eruptions of misinformation all around us. And, why exactly are we seeing so many recycled news stories in social media these days?
A trend toward shaming journals that promote their impact factors needs to be rolled back. Impact factors are journal metrics. It’s the other uses that need to be curtailed.
More and more studies are emerging showing how misdirecting and expanding citations can lead to long-term misconceptions and mistaken belief systems in the sciences.
Long “Instructions to Authors” filled with ancillary policies and undifferentiated requirements don’t help authors, staff, or editors. As the graveyard for unmade decisions, they’ve only gotten longer and more opaque. Maybe it’s time to clean yours up!
An interview with the President of the Council of Scientific Society Presidents, on the unintended and potentially damaging consequences of public and open access mandates and embargoes.
The DOAJ is kicking out hundreds of predatory and scam publishers that found their way into the directory, and tightening standards to ensure that they don’t sneak back in. Which makes things a bit awkward for a community that, for years, has been insisting that predatory OA publishing isn’t a problem worth worrying about.
Google recently disclosed that they give Web sites higher ranking if they are encrypted. This is but one example of how Google serves as a gatekeeper of the Internet, making cultural decisions in the name of technological elegance.
A recent “Slate” article shows what can go wrong when we talk about “peer review” as if we all share a common definition about an unchanging phenomenon.
The Authors Guild’s lawsuit against HathiTrust over the latter’s massive library of digitized print books has been dismissed by the Second Circuit Court. What does this mean for libraries, authors, and readers?
A paper claiming to have identified “the 1%” in productive published researchers may suffer from problems with disambiguation, timing, and scope.
A ruse to self-review and self-recommend papers for publication leads to 60 retractions. Can we find a way to prevent this kind of identity fraud and its consequences?
The censorship scandal at Taylor & Francis has wrapped up, and the lessons are as obvious as you think.
Presumptions about the benefits of access fail to take into account the power and difficulty of true engagement with diverse publics.